


Mastering the Cut

by InsectKin



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Surgeon AU, this is half crack
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 21:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12566124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsectKin/pseuds/InsectKin
Summary: Dr. Morozova is a surgical prodigy and master of the cut. Dr. Starkov has the luck and misfortune of becoming his intern.





	Mastering the Cut

**Author's Note:**

> NB: I am not a doctor. Expect the approximately same level of reality as you see on medical shows, except that I also don’t have any surgical consultants on staff. 
> 
> Full speed ahead!

Alina blinked, fidgeted. Coughed into her white sleeve. Maybe he hadn’t heard her, maybe she should say it again – but his countenance, as brutally beautiful as it was, didn’t invite repetition. He stared down at her, unamused.

She’d thought the stories about him were overblown – no one with standing job offers around the world would choose to work at a teaching hospital  _and_ be that much of a misanthrope. 

She had apparently been wrong.

When he did choose to respond, it wasn’t exactly the first words she’d hoped to hear from the doctor who would be her mentor for the next year. “ _You’re_ my intern.”

“Yup!” she replied, far too brightly.

He looked her over, his gaze traveling down the white coat she was so proud of and back up in quick dismissal. “Do you have  _any_  surgical experience?”

“Um, no, sir – er, doctor. I just graduated medical school, you know, last week.” She mentally chastised herself for her timidity and wished, not for the first time, that she had the same unreasonable self-confidence that all the other surgical interns seemed to.

Disbelief and dismay warred across his features. “And before that?”

If only the last conversation she’d had with her parents before they died had been about her being a dermatologist, or a professor, or a dog-walker – if only they’d told her to go into anything but surgery. But she’d busted her butt for years and here she finally was, intern to a surgeon who was a worldwide legend. Damn if she was going to let him get the better of her on her first day.

She snorted. “What, you think I spent my childhood cutting open my friends?”

She’d been expecting him to disavow the idea, but he just lifted an eyebrow in an expression she couldn’t read. It was uniquely disconcerting. “So I’m going to have to teach you everything.”

“Not everything,” she countered. “I did go to med school.”

“Did you.” His gaze sharpened to a scalpel’s edge and she got her first glimpse of the surgeon Morozova, ready to carve open a living subject. “Then let’s see what you know, shall we?”

* * *

“Dr. Starkov.”

Alina bent her head towards the linoleum floor, trying to stifle the smile that threatened to erupt across her features any time she was called that. She hadn’t quite gotten control of the grin by the time she turned around, but the steel gaze that met hers made quick work of the kill.

This seemed like a bad way to begin her second day.  

“My office, please.” Dr. Morozova gestured to down the hallway. She marched ahead of him and entered, sitting in the chair in front of his desk as he sat behind it. He leaned back, elbows on his armrests and fingers steepled in front of his chest, and stared at her.

For a while. She could only return the look for a few seconds before diverting her eyes to the bookshelf behind him. The books were worn, each shelf bookended by bones hinged together with wire. It wasn’t unusual for a surgeon’s office to have skeletons interspersed with the decor, but there were significantly  _more_  bones in the room than she’d expected.

“Um,” she said, finally tired of looking anywhere but at him and hoping he’d say something. “Am I in trouble?”

“Do you know what I read this morning?”

“The newspaper?” she guessed.

“Your file.” He leaned forwarded, rested his forearms on the desk. “You graduated first in your class. From the best medical school in the country.”

She blinked, unsure of where he was going but pretty sure she wasn’t going to like it. “I already knew that?” she asked, her nervousness forcing her snark into a question.

Dr. Morozova sneered. “There it is again.”

“There  _what_  is?”

“That appalling lack of confidence. I grilled you for three hours yesterday. Based on your tone alone, I would have said you had no idea what you were talking about – yet you answered every question I asked perfectly. You don’t seem to know what it is you know, let alone have the ego to slice into someone else.”

Her anger at being insulted finally eclipsed her anxiety. “I figured if I ever needed extra ego, there would be no shortage of surgeons to borrow it from. And here I am, paired up with you, giving me a convenient lifetime supply.”

He leaned forward even further, nearly in her face despite the desk between them. “I have the ego,” he said, voice tense but even, “because I’m the best at what I do. If I second-guessed myself all the time, I couldn’t be.”

Her brain generated a number of responses to that, but she bit her tongue, not trusting herself to not make a bad situation worse.

“You could be an excellent surgeon if you believed in yourself.”

“Just because I don’t think I’m the best doesn’t mean I don’t believe in –”

“You don’t,” he interrupted. Then he leaned back in his chair, picked up a file of case notes and began leafing through them, dismissing her. “I hope you’ll decide to one day, though. Preferably soon.”

* * *

There were leaves on the trees. And birds. Alina blinked slowly, allowing her brain to reacclimate to sunlight and the fact that a world existed beyond the walls of the hospital. Her first week as an intern had been brutal but she hadn’t killed anyone – a low bar but a good start. She inhaled deeply and mentally gave herself a gold star as she began the walk to her car.  _Good job not murdering your patients, Alina._

“Leaving already, Dr. Starkov?”

Alina startled and stopped, turning towards the voice. Her mentor sat on a bench outside the hospital, a stack of files in his lap.

They’d spoken almost not at all since their meeting in his office several days prior, though he’d been conspicuously present as she went about her rounds, hovering in the shadows, watching, waiting – though for what, she wasn’t sure. She had returned the favor during his surgeries, positioning herself in the corners of the room to watch as he sliced, examined, and arranged with a deftness and confidence that she would never be able to muster. She hadn’t killed any humans her first week, but she was getting ready to bury her hope of becoming even a mediocre surgeon in a shallow grave.

She sighed and rubbed a hand across her face, trying to hide both her fatigue and her caffeine shakes. “Yeah, it’s … I’m off, now. I’ve been working for twenty-four hours straight.”

“Is that all.” His gaze was even and clear though Alina could have sworn he’d been at the hospital at least as long as she had. “They let interns get by with so little these days.”

This was too much. Half the reason his reputation was what it was was that he was impossibly young himself – while there were other surgeons that approached his skill level, none were within even a decade or two of his age. “It can’t possibly be that different from when you were a medical student,” she snapped.

“You’d be surprised at what’s changed.”

His medical school must have had a class in non-answers or else he was just a prodigy at those, too. “How old are you, anyway?

“One hundred and twenty.”

She lowered her lids halfway. “You expect me to believe that?”

“Yes,” he turned back to his files. “I count in surgeon years. If you can ever be bothered to become a decent surgeon, you will too, soon enough.”

* * *

Dr. Morozova materialized seemingly from nowhere as Alina was making herself coffee in the breakroom. She avoided spilling it all over her white coat, but it was a close call.

He leaned against the counter in front of the sugars she’d been about to grab, a case file dangling carelessly from one hand. “There’s a surgery I want you to take tomorrow.”

That was enough to almost make her forget her coffee. “What? Why?”

“Because I’m a surgeon and you’re my intern.”

“You don’t even like me.” One of these days, Alina would remember that she didn’t always have to say what she was thinking.

One brow raised a millimeter. “I don’t have to like you.” A beat, considering. “I saw how you handled Mrs. Bratslov’s case yesterday.”

“You saw that?” she whispered. It had not been her finest hour; she’d been performing a routine examination when the woman had gone into cardiac arrest. Alina had screamed for backup, grabbing the defibrillator and giving the first person into the room the instructions that happened to pop into her head. They hadn’t been the ones she’d learned in medical school, though at the time she said them they seemed correct; she still hadn’t figured out why.

“I did.”

“She almost  _died_.”

“But she didn’t.” He straightened and walked towards her, his head tilted down to look her in the eyes. “You made a call –”

“A bad one,” she interrupted, though he had to have known it.

“The only bad calls are the ones that don’t work. Something went wrong and you handled it, well. There is confidence buried somewhere in there. You just need the right thing to bring it out.”

“And you think this is the way to do it?”

He handed her a file. “Read this tonight. Surgery is tomorrow.”

* * *

She scrubbed her hands viciously, trying to project the confidence she knew she should feel, attempting to hide the shaking that betrayed her intense nerves over her very first surgery.

“This is straightforward,” Dr. Morozova said from the sink next to her. “Simple patellar fix. In and out.”

“Right, right.” Alina nodded her head, scrubbing under her fingernails. “I just don’t want to forget the plan.”

“You remember the plan.”

“Sure I do.” She swallowed. “But could we maybe just go over it one more time?”

He cut her a glance. She was worried he might call off the surgery right now, send her home, kick her out of the program – but whatever he saw in her face, he relented. “One more time: we’re going to go in there. I’m going to pick up a scalpel and get the site prepared for you. That means that I will strip away all of the skin, all of the flesh, until you have no surface but knee. All you have to do is take it from there.” He lifted his foot from the pedal, turning off the faucet. “Ready?”

She rinsed her forearms and did the same. “As I’ll ever be.”

“You need to believe in yourself. For what it’s worth,” he continued as he shook the excess water from his fingers in the sink, “I do.”

He headed towards the operating room before she could respond. When he reached the door he turned, hands held in front of him, ready to push it open with his back. “Wait,” she said. “What are you wearing?”

“Scrubs,” Dr. Morozova replied.

“They’re  _black_.”

A corner of his lips quirked, not quite a smile. “Hides the blood.”

He leaned back into the door, letting it swing shut behind him. Alina took a deep breath and followed suit, entering the operating room for her first surgery.

* * *

Her hands had stopped shaking by the time her mentor handed her the scalpel and she made her first cut into a living human. It had gone better than she anticipated – not only had she done well, but, to her horror, she’d  _enjoyed_ it. Dr. Morozova had stood as he had for most of the week prior – unmoving, silent, just watching – and she had been grateful for the mask that had hidden her smile as she sewed the final stitches into place.

Her fourth day as an intern, she had put in an inquiry to the anesthesiology department to see if a transfer might be possible. She’d heard the saying in medical school before, and they had repeated it to her then: “If your favorite place in the hospital is the operating room, be an anesthesiologist. If your favorite place in the world is an operating room, be a surgeon.”

After the surgery, as the two of them made their way through the maze of corridors to their lockers, shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor, she felt it acutely: she was walking away from her favorite place in the world.

Her mentor looked down at her. Even without the safety of a mask, she found that her smile couldn’t be constrained.

“I told you,” was all he said.

* * *

Her fifteenth surgery made her feel as invincible as the first. “Did you see that?” Alina practically screamed, jumping into the air. “I  _crushed_  that tendon!” She furrowed her brow. “In a good way.”

“That you did,” Dr. Morozova agreed. “But the surgery ended minutes ago. Take some of that youthful exuberance and direct it towards the problem at hand.”

“You’re no fun at all,” Alina complained. He’d become a more active mentor over the last month; she had thought she might find some humanity underneath his all-work-no-play exterior, but she’d only found an interior that was no-play-all-work.

“You’re not the first person to point that out.”

She sighed, not wanting to let go of the post-surgical high, but finally turned around. She was face to face with a tumor on a backlit scan. She examined it a while, trying to focus.

“Well?” Dr. Morozova asked from behind her. “What’s your diagnosis, doctor?”

She’d been working with him on straightforward cases so far, building up, but this was the first time he’d let her see what the whole department referred to as a Morozova Surgery. The tricky surgeries, the ones only he could handle.

The answer hit her. She lifted her hand to her mouth. “We’re going to have to take the whole thing out.” The surgery was going to be horrifyingly invasive – this was not a part of the body she was looking forward to rooting around for cancer cells in, but there was no other choice.

“What about cutting off the blood supply? Finding some way to starve it?”

He was testing her, and she shook her head, transfixed with the image, beginning to mentally step through the incisions. “We’re not going to be able to control the tumor, it’s too much. We’re going to have to cut it out completely.” She whirled around, more confident than she could ever remember being before. “This is going to be fun.”

He smiled at her for a moment, then looked at the desk he sat on and moved a paper to one side. “Yes,” he said. “It will be.”

* * *

The next week, Alina high-fived the head of surgery after he had watched them perform the operation – flawlessly. She was walking down the hall with her mentor, still smiling to herself when Dr. Morozova leaned closer and spoke.

“We don’t high five over surgeries, Alina.”

“You don’t,” she replied. “Maybe people just like me more.”

“If you keep up that sort of behavior,” he continued, his voice casual and more serious for it, “you’ll kill both of our careers.”

“ _My_  career will be just fine.” They reached a turn in the hallway where Alina would head back to her locker and Morozova to his. “And if your whole career is built on being an unrelenting asshole, maybe it’s time to rethink your strategy.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “It’s half the reason I went into surgery in the first place.”

“What’s the other half?” she asked, but he just continued down the hallway. “Wait,” she called after him, “where are you going?”

“Home,” he replied over his shoulder without breaking his stride.

She hadn’t really thought that he lived at the hospital, but as she watched him walk away she realized she’d never actually seen him leave. She stood dumbly as his black clad figure disappeared into the parking structure, a strange loneliness settling in her chest. She’d never been in the hospital without Dr. Morozova before.

She blinked a few times, shook her head, then headed to her locker. Whatever she was feeling, it was nothing that a hot shower and a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure.

**Author's Note:**

> That was ridiculously fun to write and it's possible I'll continue this casually (ie not on a set updating schedule) – if that interests you and you have any ideas, leave them in a comment!
> 
> And shout out to the two anesthesiologists I met at a party last weekend and who didn't realize they were helping me do research for this fic. They were awesome.


End file.
